WoW PLAYER EFFICACY
This three-part article series analyzes the relationship between player self-efficacy and commitment to WoW, with a focus on how players’ sense of competence in the game affects their gameplay behavior and retention. Self-efficacy is described as how someone perceives their capability of completing a task [ 11 ]. Most relevantly, an individual’ s self-efficacy affects their expectations as well as their choice of tasks that they pursue [ 12 ]. In particular, people avoid tasks that they do not think they can handle and pursue tasks that they think they can manage [ 12 ]. And specific to commitment over time, a person’ s self-efficacy also determines the level of effort and persistence they are willing to put into a task they perceive as difficult [ 12 ].
� Figure 3: Number of copies of World of Warcraft expansion packs sold on the 1st day worldwide from 2007 to 2020( in millions) [ Graph ], Activision Blizzard, December 20, 2020. [ Online ]. Available: https:// www. statista. com / statistics / 370010 / world-of-warcraft-expansion-pack-sales /
Part one of this games user research( GUR) study measures players’ WoW self-efficacy and number of years played. An online survey was distributed to past and present WoW players via two major platforms: the r / wow subreddit( 2.2 million members) and the WoW Discord server( 90,000 members), with permission from the respective moderators. A total of 2,351 participants completed the survey, providing a sample size with a 99 % confidence interval and 0.228 margin of error. The survey items were reliable, with a Cronbach’ s alpha of 0.86.
Since self-efficacy is domain specific, meaning that a person’ s beliefs in their abilities can vary depending on the context [ 11 ], the self-efficacy measure was operationalized to reflect WoW contexts. The numeric data collected was transformed into two categories based on the sample’ s mean self-efficacy score. Participant self-efficacy groups were distributed as low( scores between 8 and 32) and high( scores above 32). A one-way Anova analysis shows that there is a very significant relationship between self-efficacy and years played( p = 0.004). In this sample, the mean number of years playing WoW differs significantly among the levels of player self-efficacy. Analysis confirms that the group in the high self-efficacy group has more time( an average of 12.115